Thursday, January 24, 2008

Astronomers need your help!

Classifying a million galaxies is hard work and many brains toiling away, it turns out, are better at this than a computer. Visit Galaxy Zoo to join 80,000 others who are viewing and identifying galaxy types. There’s a tutorial to teach you how to tell elliptical from spiral, clockwise from counter-clockwise, mergers from singletons, etc. The photographs are beautiful, the science writing very clear, there’s a blog and a forum and you are contributing to scientific knowledge.